Aesthetics and Modernity

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Preface

The essays, which form the core of this book, developed throughout the last several years. They came out as separate, autonomous texts. However, they are all informed by the same attitude which combines two research perspectives: philosophical-aesthetic reflection on modernity, one the one hand, and phenomenological reflection, on the other. Thus, the texts assembled in this volume make up a certain whole which not only shows the relationship between the two research paths but also fits within their common framework. In what follows, I grapple with a recurring question which has preoccupied my philosophical and aesthetic research in recent years, namely: How have the functions of the aesthetic changed today in the context of the leading philosophical and cultural trends of late modernity?

Are the aesthetic’s functionalization routes, such as emancipation, compensation, criticism, communication, escapist function, or totalization, carved out by modernity, still valid? What is the aesthetic today: an escape from the world, a way of manifesting the truth, a way of reintegrating and repairing the world, constructing new possibilities or just entertainment, easy consolation, illusion? Perhaps, it is possible to discover new connections between the routes – connections which exist but which are not yet visible or evident – marked out on the map of philosophical, aesthetic, and artistic practices that answer the above questions? In the following chapters, which are modified versions of my previous articles, I elaborate on such connections. I test my conviction – and one can treat it as a thesis – that there is a strong connection between late-modern cultural and philosophical ways of art functionalization and phenomenology, especially in its contemporary version. I believe that the phenomenological perspective shows its particular philosophical and methodological usefulness in recognizing many changes that occurred, and are still occurring, in the late-modern way of experiencing the world. I refer to the transformations in the scope that is necessary to raise the above-mentioned aesthetic issues. Applying such a perspective, I bring out some dominants in the transformation of human experience of the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, emphasizing a variety of phenomena linked to the functionalization of reality. First of all, I refer to the authors of the time. Hence the term “new functionalization” used in the title. The notion is also new in the sense that the perception of the links between the reflection on the state of late modernity and the philosophical assumptions and methodological possibilities of phenomenology is neither frequent nor sufficiently ← 9 | 10 →developed, at least in the field of aesthetics. In this book, I do not aim to present systemic approaches to such relationships. Rather, I sketch them as possibilities, the beginning of the path I wish to promote. Hence the cautious preposition “toward” used in the title.

“Aesthetics and Modernity” is also the title of a seminar I have been conducting for over ten years in the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. The seminar gathered many young researchers, some of whom have already gone their own independent ways, and practicing artists. I owe them special gratitude. The lively seminar discussions were a strong impulse for me to gather up traces and parts I recorded – and to rethink them.

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Introduction: Toward a New Philosophical Functionalization of the Concept of Art¹

Contemporary philosophical thinking about art must face the challenge posed by the deep transformation that is taking place in philosophy itself – the change in its perspectives and instruments. It also has to meet the challenge presented by artistic practice that constantly pushes the boundaries of art, its place within broadly understood social, cultural, and economic practices, as well as the changing character of sensibility of contemporary audiences.

On the one hand, contemporary high art is doing fairly well: museums, philharmonics, opera theatres are far from empty (although, we are more or less commonly aware of the functional transformations in the field of social, political or market contexts of these institutions). On the other hand, however, the substitution of stable structures of experience with the experience of happening and disappearing, medialization or broadly understood aesthetization of our world manifest themselves, among others, in the form of mutual permeation of high and popular art, and everyday experiences. We listen to classical music in the car, contemporary opera or film mix genres, classical pieces are combined with pop music.

No wonder that traditional aesthetics, borne out of the spirit of Baumgarten and Kant, the philosophy of art that draws on the philosophy that systemically legitimizes traditional values (such as beauty, the sublime, pathos, the tragic, etc.) becomes subject to renewed, sometimes skeptical, methodological, but also interdisciplinary reflection. More and more often, it concerns the relation between the transformations taking place in contemporary art and the processes of phenomenalization resp. fictionalization of contemporary reality (following in the footsteps of Nietzche, Vattimo, on the one hand, and Baudrillard, Debord, on the other). In consequence of this reflection, if we do not wish to deprive aesthetics of its broad, philosophical breath, it has to rethink its metaphysical lineage in view of the transformation taking place in philosophy itself as well as revise the concepts that it operates with. Especially, given that we still have trouble applying the instruments of traditional aesthetics that is tied to metaphysics to contemporary reality – to the requirements of contemporary humanities and, at the same time, to the requirements of changing art.

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In the humanities, philosophy, and aesthetics, traditional terms, such as art, are still valid and we continue to go back to the old solutions that have been well established in the history of philosophy. At the same time, however, the philosophical crisis of traditional metaphysics and the break from systemic practice of philosophy deprives aesthetics of its safe place among the faculties that could comprise a hierarchical and structured whole.

I do not believe that the awareness of such a state of affairs should lead us to and completely give into the ephemeric fascinations with absolutized new centers that are characteristic of contemporary humanities, and which are supposed to organize the field of research on art, and make us abandon the philosophical ground of reflection as “essential thinking” (to use Heidegger’s language) for the sake of such fascinations.

The term used by contemporary humanities is “turn.” It seems that it replaces the former divisions of experiences based on the assumption of independence and separation of legitimizations of particular fields. Authors who wrote about this phenomenon, such as Medick-Bachmann2 or the authors of the collective work entitled Zwroty badawcze w humanistyce. Konteksty poznawcze, kulturowe i społeczno-instytucjonalne³ enumerate the following turns: interpretative, reflexive, performative, memory, spatial, somatic, affective, and iconic. The list remains open, however, let us add: aesthetic (e.g. in phenomenology), posthumanist, linguistic, narrative, and textual turn. The multitude of universalizing claims, new perspectives that come to be called “turns” comprise an open, dynamic, and labile picture of contemporary humanities, whose more or less ephemeric centers are trying to subsume as broad thematic field as possible, and at the same time – in response to the proposed perspective – provoke the generation of ever new centers. It is no longer a picture of a calm and static coexistence that could be led (the question is if they ever did?) by separate domains of experience, which had their own legitimization, deriving their autonomy from the old, Kantian division into faculties.